Niall's Weblog

I’ve been playing with the recently-released HTTP API for accessing the Best Buy product catalog. While its a little strange to use at first, its actually pretty useful. One of the things I am interested in is online retail, specifically how to make Internet shopping easier. Lets imagine I am looking for [...]

On ORMs
It so happens that I end up dealing with the Python ORM SQLObject pretty often. I don’t really like ORMs very much, since in my experience they make those 80% of database things that are already easy to do with plain SQL easier, while making the other 20% of database things which are [...]

I wrote in a previous article about using SQLite with Pylons. SQLite is great for small-to-medium web projects and also prototyping. Its not very hard to port a SQLite implementation to a more robust and scalable RDBMS such as PostgreSQL.
Anyway, if you have used SQLite in any capacity, you have no doubt noticed [...]

I run OpenBSD on all my machines. I think its a great operating system with excellent range of features and all the components fit together nicely. One of my favourite things about OpenBSD is the highly aggressive release schedule. While a stable release is cut every 6 months, Theo is producing complete, [...]

This article is a followup to my previous post, Facebook apps in Python and Pylons part 1. I’m going to talk a little more about what is interesting about Facebook apps and how they work in practice. At the end, I provide a little code sample and a convenience decorator to save you [...]